


Bewitched

by MabtheWinterQueen



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aro/Ace Character, Aromantic Character, Asexual Character, Bisexual Character, Bisexual Character of Color, Characters of color, F/F, F/M, Fae & Fairies, Fair Folk, Fantastic Racism, Fantasy and Science, Female Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Human Racism (very short), Internalized Aphobia, LGBTQ+ Characters of Color, LGBTQ+ characters, Lesbian Character, M/M, Male Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Mental Health Issues, Modern Fantasy, Multi, Multiverse, Nonbinary Character, Other, Pansexual Character, Pansexual Character of Color, Past Toxic Relationship(s), Trans Female Character, Trans character of color
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-12 14:51:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19947985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MabtheWinterQueen/pseuds/MabtheWinterQueen
Summary: Hope Clarke lives an unremarkably human life in an unremarkably human college town in an unremarkably human universe. But then again, first impressions can be wrong.Hope has known she isn't quite human since she was a little girl. Her blood is too thick and not the right color, and she could be wrong, but humans generally don't glow when they're under intense stress. Her mother and brothers are all thin- and red-blooded humans, so it's kind of hard, but she makes it work.Hope doesn't really care to find out who her father was or even what he was. All she really wants is for the portal in her mom's rosebushes to close and the talking bats in the attic to go back to Ch'Thonia, alternate dimension of the Fair Folk. Unfortunately, the Fair Folk have different ideas.





	Bewitched

**Author's Note:**

> This story hinges on: friendship; love (platonic and romantic); girls being awesome; and family. It will not include: toxic masculinity; abusive relationships; transphobia; homophobia; or discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in general. It will include backstory with a TOXIC RELATIONSHIP and RACISM (the human kind), if shortly, so please take care of yourselves. (This is not the same as an abusive relationship, as there's no actual abuse involved - one character is simply aro/ace and tries to force herself into a relationship due to internalized aphobia.)

Normal people get to deal with bats in their attics with a broom and thick layers to prevent getting rabies or something. Naturally, I have to deal with them with berries and strongly-worded letters.

“Mom, please just call an exterminator,” I beg for the fiftieth time as I’m shuffled toward the attic with a bowl of raspberries, “or literally any of my brothers. Please. For the love of God.”

“I will not waste time or money getting someone who lives farther from me or costs me more than you do,” she refuses like always.

I sigh and trudge up the stairs with my hands full, doing the usual awkward shoulder-shuffle to get the bowl into one arm and open the attic trapdoor. “Bats! Your weekly incentive to get out of our damn house!”

I’m greeted with flapping and silence, as is also usual.

“Bats!”

One small brown bat edges close to me, her little face scrunched up with distaste.

“Halfling,” she squeaks, like they all begin when they speak to me, “desist calling us ‘bats’ when you know perfectly well that we are not of this plane.”

A slightly larger creature snorts. “Yeah, how many other ‘bats’ do you know that can speak in perfect Human, stupid Halfling?”

I raise an eyebrow. “Human isn’t a language.”

It scoffs. “Of course it is.”

“Fine,” I relent, not willing to have the same argument with a creature the size of my hand. “Meniadi! Your weekly incentive to get out of our damn house.”

The not-bats squeak and jeer at me, but all of them flock closer, eyeing the bowl of berries.

“Come on,” I coax as I slowly begin to descend the ladder. “There’s lots more in the back yard. All you have to do is get out.”

They flap about but otherwise remain inside the attic, as always, and I cajole them and try to make them sympathetic to my needing to go soon so “please, please, _please_ , don’t make me late”, and return the untouched bowl to my mother.

She tuts at my failure and I sigh, putting on my jacket and leaving for my friends’ dorm.

It’s a short walk from our house to the college, but the chilled early-autumn breeze makes everything seem to take longer when only last week it was 85 and sunny. The trees are in that state where half of them are still stubbornly green and others are becoming half-yellow at one side, and the air tastes like the rain that fell last night.

My friends and I all attend the college, but only I live off-campus for money reasons. They don’t all actually have the same dorm, but Jasna’s roommate is off with her girlfriend all the time and only really sleeps there half the week, so it’s unofficially Steve’s second dorm, and Hiroki spends most of his days there, though no one actually knows if he has his own room or if he’s even registered to be _at_ the college at all. He’s Jasna’s cousin and he just kind of… shows up sometimes.

I don’t have to even knock on the door before it’s open and Steve is smiling widely at me, pulling me inside without so much as a “hi”.

In the tiny dorm which really isn’t built for more than two people, Jasna is sitting on her bed with books written in Ch’Thonic strewn all around her and Hiroki is sitting on the ground, peeking inside one with a really lewd picture on the cover.

“Why do you even have this?” he asks before throwing it aside and moving on to the next one in his path.

Jasna turns a slightly darker shade of chestnut as she smacks his side. “It’s Mab’s and you know it. Besides, she says it’s really educational.”

“Aww,” Steve coos as she makes a small heart with her hands and I begin humming _Here Comes the Bride_.

Jasna’s flush deepens and she gives us the “I hate you” look.

Hiroki snickers. “Come on, you already live together _and_ you’ve got a kid. I can hear the bells…”

“I hate each and every one of you,” she groans. “You know it’s more complicated than that.”

“You have a kid?” I ask curiously. I’m the newest member of the group, only meeting Jasna a few years ago at the beginning of college when she was just another new face in the crowd, and she only really stood out for her southern English accent and her facial tattoo, a marking of her rank in the UnSeelie Court I shouldn’t have seen unless I wasn’t fully human.

“She’s my brother’s,” Jasna explains. “He died a few years ago so I’m her legal guardian now. She’ll be five in December.”

“Please,” Steve snorts, sitting on the other bed and plucking a book from the floor. “She’s your kid. You’re the only Aka’ti she remembers. Mab is the only Asa’fi she’s had. She loves you more than literally anything else. You’re her parents.”

I smile at the fond look on my friend’s face and sit opposite Hiroki, the only way we’ll all fit without sitting on anyone’s lap. “So, what are we looking for?”

Jasna huffs. “I can’t find my book on advanced astrophysics. I have the class tomorrow and I need to find it before then.”

I try to read a book title. “Does this say… ‘Royal Frog Murder’?”

Steve laughs and Hiroki looks like he wants to.

“That’s a no.”

“That’s a no,” Hi confirms. “It says ‘Monarchs of the Late 15th Century’.”

I wince. For some Halflings, reading Ch’Thonic is easier than breathing (literally), but for others, it’s just like any other language. I suppose I’m in the latter half, because I also can’t hear most of it. My ears just can’t pick up the frequencies.

Jasna smiles sympathetically, taking the book from me gently, and I get a flash of the anxiety and fondness she feels in tandem, feeling a little disoriented by the emotional transference that started when I was twelve and started puberty.

“What’s the cover look like?” I ask, because I can’t read Ch’Thonic but I’m also not colorblind.

“It’s black with purple and blue and white galaxies on the cover,” she replies, “but it changes sometimes.”

“It changes,” I repeat, because sometimes I feel like I’m getting the hang of this “my-friends-are-not-human” gig and then they spring something like this.

“Mmhmm,” she nods. “Turns blue.”

“Okay,” I mutter.

“Aha!” Steve cries, holding up a blue book with galaxies on the cover and writing all in Ch’Thonic. “Ooh, Jas, this is _expensive_. Let me guess: Mabbie acted as your Sugar Mama when you told her you needed new textbooks?”

Jasna colors and snatches the book from her. “Not funny.”

“It was a little funny,” Hi smirks, getting a boot to the side for his trouble.

I give a small chuckle and move out of the way of a playful swat from my foreign friend, reveling in the scent of old books and laughter.

Oh, how fleeting a scent it is.

…

My weeks fly by without a hint of strangeness on the air until three weeks later, close to Samhain and the annual festival the UnSeelie on campus hold, which is basically just Jasna and Hiroki and their friend Sam because Steve, as a shifter, is Between and we don’t know what I am. We’re still invited as honorary UnSeelie and Mab comes over with brownies and smiles and this year, their daughter, Emilija, will be there as it’ll be at Mab’s place. Last year, my boyfriend Matt came with, but we don’t really talk anymore. The breakup wasn’t his fault. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I just couldn’t make myself love him as anything other than a friend, and when we tried to be physical… I knew. He… just didn’t take it very well.

This year Jasna has decorated her dorm with streamers and faerie lights (no faeries were harmed in the making of this product) with small dragonlights, glowing stones made from fossilized dragon blood, inside, and I wonder if that’s another of her family heirlooms. When I turn up, her tattoo is glowing and she’s adorned her arms in golden bangles, her horns shined and covered in a thin layer of gold dust. Her dress is more understated in shades of red that ombre into a soft, light orange, and I feel slightly underdressed in a delicate lilac dress and a silver necklace, but Jasna doesn’t seem to notice, instead complimenting me on my heels. She’s always excited for Samhain because it’s a bigger deal in the UnSeelie countries like England than it is in Seelie ones like the States.

Steve is in her real dorm for once, wearing a flowy green tunic with small rosebuds growing at the hem and tiny vines in her ears, a soft crown of daisies contrasting lightly with her fair brown hair. Her dark leggings and velvety boots are her normal wear, and Jasna lends her some gold dust for her hair, which settles lightly on the flowers and makes her look more other-worldly than usual: as a shapeshifter, she often looks human enough that I can forget that she’s not.

Hiroki just shows up as we’re halfway to Mab’s house, already all dolled up for the holiday similarly to Jasna. His deep slate dress shirt is slightly wrinkled like it’s been slept in, and it might have been, knowing him. He’s wearing dark dress pants and the blackest shoes I’ve ever seen, and his hair’s been pulled back to expose his pointed ears to the world, gleaming argentine tunnels newly applied and small, off-white horns covered in a healthy dose of silver powder. Jasna berates him for being “late” and he laughs, teeth small but all equally sharp and glinting in the moonlight.

Tonight is when I feel truly an outsider amongst my friends: all of them are at their most powerful, their most otherworldly, and I’m once again reminded that I’m a part yet apart of that world. Tonight is when Jasna’s amber eyes glow in the dark like the predator dragon she is, and Hiroki’s teeth get sharp enough to slice through bone with a warning nip, and Steve seems to blink in and out with another woman, a man, a monstrous beast of nightmare. Tonight is the Samhain, and tonight is when the monsters come out to play.

My body begins to tingle with the sensation I now can mostly control, and I force the lavender hue back under my skin, into my blood, to stay where it belongs. I don’t like glowing in public, even though Humans don’t have the ability to see through my natural glamour anyways. It makes me even more stressed out until even I get blinded by my own bioluminescence. Tonight, it’s especially strong, and it rips past my weak defenses, bursting from my skin as light in patterns of veins and arteries, capillaries not as bright and harder to see. I can feel my eyes shifting, my head aching, and then it all begins to blur.

When I come to, it’s on a soft sofa in someone’s living room. The room is decorated in the same streamers and faerie lights as Jasna’s dorm as well as ceramic pumpkins and paintings of Fair Folks, and my muzzy brain puts together that this is probably Mab and Jasna’s place.

When I turn my head slightly, a small child comes into view, staring straight into my eyes. She looks to be about five, with glowing silver eyes and curling red hair tucked around her ears, which come to a sharp point just like Jasna’s. Her small horns have small streamers twisted around them and her nose is dappled with soft little freckles. She doesn’t move her face any farther from mine, her warm breath moving my own dark curls, a little thicker than hers, every few seconds or so.

Eventually, the child gets bored with me and toddles off, giving me a clearer view of the room and of the cute red dress her mothers undoubtedly picked out for the occasion. She must tell someone I’m awake, because Mab bustles out from another room in a silver dress that looks like it’s been made of moonlight, and a feeling of worry suddenly slams into me head-on, making me furrow my own brow in a parody of hers. She puts her hand to my forehead to take my temperature and I feel like my head will explode.

“How are you feeling?” she asks in that same accent Jasna has, southern English but not quite there. “Nauseous? Headache? You just passed out at the Eleventh Hour.”

The Eleventh Hour, when all power is at its greatest.

The Eleventh Hour, when I was born.

“Do you think it’s possible,” I begin nervously, “that a Halfling could develop their powers… on their twenty-first birthday?”

Mab’s eyes go wide and I get slapped in the face with a round of shock. “You think you’re Manifesting? Is that why you glowed? Oh, darling, I didn’t know your birthday was today! I would’ve prepared.”

I close my eyes tightly. “Yes, I think I’m Manifesting. Can you… Is it possible for you not to feel so strongly?”

“Oh,” Mab nods, “you’re an Empath. That explains a lot.”

The Dark Elf puts her hands over the sides of my head, her calm seeping into my pores, and lightly touches the backs of my eyelids. When she removes her hands, her emotions are hers again.

“How did you do that?” I ask curiously.

“Mental shielding, darling. I used mine to strengthen yours. Of course, you’ll need to create your own in time, but I’m not an authority on that and besides, I’m a better cook than I am a teacher.” She stands, extending her arm for me to take, and I put my hand on the crook of her elbow, where the moon-silver fabric Dark Elves make from large-flowered clematis covers her skin so I can avoid another wash of emotions so soon again.

In the yard await my friends and seemingly thousands of faerie lights, all glowing in the moonlight.

My friends rush to me, but Mab keeps them at a reasonable distance, to my relief.

She looks at them, her usually-playful eyes serious. “There’s a good chance that Hope’s Manifesting tonight as her twenty-first birthday. And, apparently, she’s a very easily overwhelmed Empath.”

Steve looks happy for me, while Jasna and Hiroki get their own respective sympathetic looks on their faces.

“I read a book on Empaths who Manifest late,” Hiroki voices. “You need a, like, special therapist. You’re going to need really good mental shielding and a lot of patience for other people being crazy stupid about it.”

“That’s what you got from that?” Jasna queries. “Late-Manifesting Empaths tend to have stronger but harder to control powers. That makes it difficult for them to function and deal with the sudden influx of emotions that they can’t turn off. You’re probably a late bloomer because your Human side is so prevalent.”

Steve touches my arm, concerned, and smiles. “I know just the person to help you.”


End file.
